January 8, 2014

Richard Breitman, distinguished professor in history at American University, examined the contentious debate that still lingers over whether Franklin Delano Roosevelt turned his back on the Jews of Hitler’s Europe.

To play this audio content please enable JavaScript, and consider upgrading to a web browser that supports HTML5 audio

Dr. Breitman is author or co-author of ten books and many articles on German history, US history, and the Holocaust. In addition to his latest book, FDR and the Jews (2103), co-authored with Allan J. Lichtman, he is best known for The Architect of Genocide: Himmler and the Final Solution (1991) and Official Secrets: What the Nazis Planned, What the British and Americans Knew (1998). He served as director of historical research for the Nazi War Criminal Records and Imperial Japanese Records Interagency Working Group, which helped bring about declassification of more than eight million pages of US government records. He is editor of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s journal Holocaust and Genocide Studies and serves as a member of the Museum’s Academic Committee. He received a BA from Yale University and a PhD from Harvard University.